Folks,My wife and I survived a middle class ordeal over the past few days
since a powerful hurricane-force thunderstorm rolled through Potomac on Sunday
afternoon. More than 300,000 families lost power in our area as a result of this
storm's impact on PEPCO, the privately-owned monopoly power utility in our area.

I was born in DC and have seen the wonders of the latter half of
the 20th century, our spanking shiny new power company's highly reliable system
which expanded tenfold in the 50s, 60s, and 70s into the megalith it is today.
PEPCO sports some of the highest rates for power in the world, about 25 cents
per kilowatt-hour (kWh), roughly half of which is for billing and distribution
costs. For many years, their rates reflected a well-run, economical utility with
service costs under 4 cents per kWh, and with outages so rare that no one
thought about the possibility of blackouts. Some record checking showed that
before 2010 we had only seen less than 24 hours of total outages over a 38-year
period in our residence, a reliability rating of better than 99.99%!

With
two days' outage during Snowmageddon (we had over five feet of snow last winter)
and another four days this week, PEPCO has now dropped to 97.14% uptime since
January 1, 2010, an increase in failure rate of more than
300:1.

PEPCO's reliability is now about as bad as third world
nations during multi-week hurricanes, massive earthquakes, tsunamis, and rampant
civil wars.

This situation is remarkable only in that PEPCO supplies the
power to the most important city in the world, Washington, DC. It is truly
fitting that after trillions was spent on beefing up national security based
here in the seat of power, total loss of power has become the mode of
life.

The "little people" (so-called by the BP CEO) are now perfectly
named as the powerless.

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Back to my wife and I, my first task was to
call in our power outage to the PEPCO emergency line. It was busy. We tried back
for fifteen hours before we got a recording. A few hours later, the refrigerator
started to smell. You can go about 24 hours before the food will spoil with a
modern fridge. I realized that I would need to find a source of dry ice (frozen
carbon dioxide) very soon. I looked up "dry ice" in the yellow pages and called
the only supplier in a 20-mile radius. They had a line of 200 customers around
the block vying for their last few thousand pounds of the precious substance. I
went anyway, and waited for three hours only to be turned away as the last
shovelfuls were dolled out within sight of the last fifty people in line. The
next shipment would be in twelve hours. I came back the next morning and waited
in line until I was allowed to buy 20 pounds. It would last for about another 24
hours, since so much of our food had already partially defrosted. All this time,
we kept calling PEPCO to no avail. The estimated repair time, as of Wednesday
afternoon, was Friday at midnight. I needed to buy more dry ice, and went back
for another $42 worth, about 20 pounds.

As an aside, PEPCO used to
provide free dry ice distributed at the local elementary schools in our area
during outages. They stopped doing it as a budget cutting exercise and as a risk
management decision. They knew that their system was becoming so unreliable that
it was inevitable that they would be forced to pay millions for dry ice for a
million people without power for days.

When I was boy, Grandad used to
buy dry ice for our "ice box" fridge in our place. The truck came by twice a
week to deliver the dry ice at our doorstep. I think it cost less than 50 cents
a week. That was back in the 50s.

I could spend paragraphs explaining to you how my wife and I suffered through this event, our meals, our troubles with no communications, burned-out batteries, no cell phones, no TV, no cable, no internet, tropically heated bedrooms, sealing the home against breakins, shaving in the dark, lack of cooked food, reading by candlelight, and other minor inconveniences. It's over now. I don't want to remember the pain.

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Back to modern PEPCO. Our impassioned
pleas to send out a crew to service our neighborhood went unheeded for days. It
got hotter and hotter, the humidity climbing daily. We had modern underground
cable everywhere in our subdivision, placed there 38 years ago. BG&Es CEO
got on the radio and told the world that PEPCO's utility had every right to
build out its network above ground and subject to falling trees and debris
because "It's easier to find the faults and fix them." I'll give him that. It's
certainly easier to see that a tree has fallen over a power line and taken out
thousands of customers. Fifteen years ago, we once had a far more powerful 100
MPH storm fell over 530 trees just in our subdivision. Our power stayed on
throughout. Our cables are buried. I even know where our feeder is located. I
told a human being at PEPCO the night before they finally sent a crew that if
they came, I would show them which one they needed to turn on. It needed to be
reset. It couldn't take more than ten minutes, and 500 families would have power
again.

It took them half an hour. They started at the wrong feeder. I
pointed the guys to the right access point. They finally got our power
on.

The upstairs of our house was over 90 F with about 65% humidity by
then. Even the second load of dry ice had evaporated!

Modern PEPCO had
split into two pieces a few years ago, doubling its expenses for management and
G&A, and halving its responsibilities, doubling its costs, and vastly
diminishing its services to customers and overall system reliability. PEPCO
hasn't built a power plant in decades. It hasn't improved its cables since Nixon
was in office. Maryland's Public Service Commission (PSC) which oversees the
utility clearly approved all the changes despite the tremendous cost to
consumers in terms of reliability, potential economic losses, and exposure to
loss of life and property. The senior management of PEPCO's two new pieces are
paid nearly 300 times as much as civil servants. It's no wonder that the "Ding
Dong School graduates" of Maryland's private utility CEOs and PSC can make such
grandiose statements about the reliability of the grid and their customer
service.

PEPCO recently stated that their service is "reliable" after one
politician on our County Council, Roger Berliner, called them out for their
negligence about buried cable.

The DC area has the "third largest tree
canopy in the country" among metropolitan areas. After seeing telephone poles
snapped off at the base like toothpicks when doubly burdened by power cables and
transformers, hanging over our main roads with tree branches draped over them,
I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Berliner. How were these geniuses allowed to
build out their system using telephone poles to hold up three times the rated
weight of the poles in heavily wooded areas? Why were the trees not cut back
along the road sides? Why were cables not buried with sensors to activate fault
isolation data broadcasts during outages?

Please don't tell me they did
not have the money. These utilities pay their risk management executives
millions of dollars a year to make decisions.

Folks, I'm just a retired
rocket scientist. What do I know about executives and their
responsibilities?

Designed first all-solar home for Ryland Homes in 1974. At MITRE, led a group of 35 of the best minds in the world (including Dr. Edward Teller, among others) who performed detailed engineering, scientific, socio-economic, and political analyses (more...)